danger seriously. I ignored Gabrielle's impassioned warnings-too sweet to hold her once 
again; and I dismissed Louis's dark suspicions as I always had.
  
  And then the jam, the cliffhanger ...
  
  Just as the sun was rising over Carmel Valley and I was closing my eyes as vampires 
must do at that moment, I realized I wasn't alone in my underground lair. It wasn't only 
the young vampires I'd reached with my music; my songs had roused from their slumber the 
very oldest of our kind in the world.
  
  And I found myself in one of those breathtaking instants of risk and possibility. What 
was to follow? Was I to die finally, or perhaps to be reborn?
  
  Now, to tell you the full story of what happened after that, I must move back a little 
in time.
  
  I have to begin some ten nights before the fatal concert and I have to let you slip 
into the minds and hearts of other beings who were responding to my music and my book in 
ways of which I knew little or nothing at the time.
  
  In other words, a lot was going on which I had to reconstruct later. And it is the 
reconstruction that I offer you now.
  
  So we will move out of the narrow, lyrical confines of the first person singular; we 
will jump as a thousand mortal writers have done into the brains and souls of "many 
characters." We will gallop into the world of "third person" and "multiple point of view."
  
  And by the way, when these other characters think or say of me that I am beautiful or 
irresistible, etc., don't think I put these words in their heads. I didn't! It's what was 
told to me after, or what I drew out of their minds with infallible telepathic power; I 
wouldn't lie about that or anything else. I can't help being a gorgeous fiend. It's just 
the card I drew. The bastard monster who made me what I am picked me on account of my 
good looks. That's the long and short of it. And accidents like that occur all the time.
  
  We live in a world of accidents finally, in which only aesthetic principles have a 
consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, 
striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under 
the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky-such brutal 
beauty is beyond dispute.
  
  Now, be assured: though I am leaving you, I will return with full flair at the 
appropriate moment. The truth is, I hate not being the first person narrator all the way 
through! To paraphrase David Copperfield, I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim 
of this tale. But either way, shouldn't I dominate it? I'm the one really telling it, 
after all.
  
  Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn't the whole issue. Vanity must wait. I 
want you to know what really took place with us, even if you never believe it. In fiction 
if nowhere else, I must have a little meaning, a little coherence, or I will go mad.
  
  So until we meet again, I am thinking of you always; I love you; I wish you were here 
... in my arms.
  
  
  
  
  PROEM
  
  DECLARATION IN THE FORM OF GRAFFITI
  -written in black felt-tip pen on a red wall in the back room of a bar called Dracula's 
Daughter in San Francisco-
  
  Children of Darkness Be Advised of the Following:
  
  BOOK ONE: Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976, was a true story. Any one of 
us could have written it-an account of becoming what we are, of the misery and the 
searching. Yet Louis, the two-hundred-year-old immortal who reveals all, insists on 
mortal sympathy. Lestat, the villain who gave Louis the Dark Gift, gave him precious 
little else in the way of explanations or consolation. Sound familiar? Louis hasn't given 
up the search for salvation yet, though even Armand, the oldest immortal he was ever to 
find, could tell him nothing of why we are here or who made us. Not very surprising, is 
it, vampire boys and girls? After all, there has never been a Baltimore Catechism for 
vampires.
  
  That is, there wasn't until the publication of:
  
  BOOK Two: The Vampire Lestat, this very week. Subtitle: His "early education and 
adventures." You don't believe it? Check with the nearest mortal bookseller. Then go into 
the nearest record store and ask to see the album which has only just arrived-also 
entitled The Vampire Lestat, with predictable modesty. Or if all else fails, switch on 
your cable TV, if you don't disdain such things, and wait for one of Lestat's numerous 
rock video films which began to air with nauseating frequency only yesterday. You will 
know Lestat for what he is immediately. And it may not surprise you to be told that he 
plans to compound these unprecedented outrages by appearing "live" on stage in a debut 
concert in this very city. Yes, on Halloween, you guessed it.
  
  But let us forget for the moment the blatant insanity of his preternatural eyes 
flashing from every record store window, or his powerful voice singing out the secret 
names and stories of the most ancient among us. Why is he doing all this? What do his 
songs tell us? It is spelled out in his book. He has given us not only a catechism but a 
Bible.
  
  And deep into biblical times we are led to confront our first parents: Enkil and 
Akasha, rulers of the valley of the Nile before it was ever called Egypt. Kindly 
disregard the gobbledygook of how they became the first bloodsuckers on the face of the 
earth; it makes only a little more sense than the story of how life formed on this planet 
in the first place, or how human fetuses develop from microscopic cells within the wombs 
of their mortal mothers. The truth is we are descended from this venerable pair, and like 
it or no, there is considerable reason to believe that the primal generator of all our 
delicious and indispensable powers resides in one or the other of their ancient bodies.